Five Major Ways of Getting Food

1. Food collection involves collecting wild vegetation, hunting animals and fishing.

2. Horticulture is plant cultivation using only simple tools and human power.

3. Pastoralism is keeping domesticated animals and using their products for food.

4. Agriculture uses animal and mechanical power and technologies, like irrigation, in horticulture.

5. Industrialization is the production of food using complex machinery.

Food Collecting

• People have been food collectors for the majority of time they have been on the earth.

• Generalizations about food-collecting societies:– They have low population densities.

– Society is nomadic or semi nomadic rather than sedentary.

– The basic social unit is the family, or band, a loose federation of families.

– Occupy remote and marginally useful areas of the world.

Food Producing Societies

• Humans didn’t procure food through horticulture or agriculture until the Neolithic revolution, 10,000 years ago.

• Changes resulting from food production:– Population increased.– Societies became more sedentary.– Stimulated a division of labor.– Drop in life expectancy.– Increase in social inequality, poverty, crime, war and

environmental degradation.

Horticulture

• Simplest form of farming using only basic hand tools.

• Produces low yields without sufficient surpluses for market systems.

• Shifting cultivation (slash and burn) involves clearing the land, burning it and planting in the burned area. Land is usually depleted within a year or two.

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Principal Regions of Horticulture at Contact Period

Pastoralism

• Pastoralism is found in areas of the world that cannot support agriculture due to terrain, soils, or rainfall.

• Movement Patterns– With transhumance, some of the men move the

livestock seasonally while women, children and other men remain in permanent settlements.

– With nomadism the whole social unit moves the livestock to new pastures.

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Principal Regions of Pastoralism at Contact Period

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Pastoralism in Southeastern Iran

Agriculture

• Technologies such as irrigation, fertilization and mechanical equipment are used to produce high yields and support large populations.

• Labor intensive and and requires high capital investment.

• Associated with settled communities, higher levels of labor specialization and more social stratification.

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Ancient Civilizations

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Principal Regions of Intensive Agriculture at Contact Period

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Musha: An Egyptian Village and Intensive Agriculture

Industrialization

• Industrialization relies on high levels of technology, a mobile labor force and a complex system of markets.

• Has revolutionized agriculture, as well as other areas of food production. (Fishing, ranching).

• Increased productivity but also responsible for considerable environmental destruction.